Spectrally resolved Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between independent sources

Abstract: Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between independent photon sources (HOMI-IPS) is the fundamental block for quantum information processing, such as quantum gate, Shor's algorithm, Boson sampling, etc. All the previous HOMI-IPS experiments were carried out in time-domain, however, the spectral information during the interference was lost, due to technical difficulties. Here, we investigate the HOMI-IPS in spectral domain using the recently developed fast fiber spectrometer, and demonstrate the spectral distribution during the HOM interference between two heralded single-photon sources, and two thermal sources. This experiment can not only deepen our understanding of HOMI-IPS in the spectral domain, but also be utilized to improve the visibility by post-processing spectral filtering.